What does church sound like? If you asked me this, I might say it’s a bell peal before service that holds both gravitas and joy in its tone, or the moment when sopranos soar into the heavens or a basso profundo dives into the depths. There are the joined voices saying the affirmation of faith and the cadence of corporate prayer. There is the unique sound that occurs when the congregation snaps the spine of the bulletin to turn it inside out, like a bite into a crisp apple echoing across the sanctuary, or how hymnals settle into place behind the pew. These are the pleasing sounds, the welcome ones, the ones we understand. But what of the sounds that are more than the building or the music? What are the sounds of our faith?
There is an abiding sound. The one from creation itself that surrounds us with its unceasing prayer and praise. Press your ear to the ground and listen to the language rising from tectonic plates and ocean tides, and the rustle of tall prairie grasses. Attend to the slow gurgle of magma and the tiny feet of voles below and sparrows on the branch above.
There is a captivating sound recorded in Genesis when the world is still wet and shaking off the dew of the first mornings. Into this Eden comes a new sound no one else had ever heard, no one else was going to hear, not in that way, not in that place: They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze (Genesis 3:8a). It is the sound of wonder and awe.
Then come the sounds of breaking. The guttural sobs that enfold loss and death, the whip of plastic bags worn as coats billowing in a chill wind, the soft-soled slippers scuffling along linoleum floors of nursing homes and hospital wards, the drip of liquid from an IV bag moving in its methodical course and the slam of doors in the wake of heated words.
There are other sounds that aren’t really sounds — or maybe they are, but they are misunderstood as silence. And within the silence we may suddenly recognize the deep murmurings of the Spirit attending us. A holy sound filling us with God’s presence and songs being sung just beneath the surface of our awareness like the rhythm of breath that we received from God’s own being, not a single breath, but a pattern of sound in the soft whoosh of air entering and leaving our lungs, the pulse of our heartbeat, the shuffle and crack of our bodies — these precede even our organized speech, welling up within us as the music that works its way out through our skin.
There is silence such as we cannot truly comprehend. When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour (Revelation 8:1). What is the silence that is not even silence but rather anticipation of whole transformation, of a great un-doing-ness, or a coming-into-being-ness, of God at work in the weaving of time and space and all that is? Is the silence that sound? And if we could go back before that first exhale of creation, before the gushing ruach tumbled over the waters of chaos, was there also that grand and expectant silence? I wonder.
In the crossroads of all these sounds, a eurythmic place where the broken and wrenching noises, the mundane ticking of daily life and the glorious arias of ecstatic joy are met in an indefinable sound that, if we could point to it or hold it or compose it, we might say it is the sound of faith itself.
NADINE ELLSWORTH-MORAN is associate pastor at Reid Memorial Presbyterian Church in Augusta, Georgia.
